ed from Buckingham
Palace impressed her restless, shallow mind--the sort of people who
prefer pair horse carriages to automobiles, have quiet friendships in
the highest quarters, quietly do not know any one else, busy themselves
with charities, dress richly rather than impressively, and have either
little water-colour accomplishments or none at all, and no other
relations with "art." At the skirts of this crowning British world Mrs.
Garstein Fellows tugged industriously and expensively. She did not keep
a carriage and pair and an old family coachman because that, she felt,
would be considered pushing and presumptuous; she had the sense to stick
to her common unpretending 80 h.p. Daimler; but she wore a special sort
of blackish hat-bonnet for such occasions as brought her near the centre
of honour, which she got from a little good shop known only to very few
outside the inner ring, which hat-bonnet she was always careful to
sit on for a few minutes before wearing. And it was to this first and
highest and best section of her social scheme that she considered that
bishops properly belonged. But some bishops, and in particular such
a comparatively bright bishop as the Bishop of Princhester, she also
thought of as being just as comfortably accommodated in her second
system, the "serious liberal lot," which was more fatiguing and less
boring, which talked of books and things, visited the Bells, went to all
first-nights when Granville Barker was the producer, and knew and valued
people in the grey and earnest plains between the Cecils and the Sidney
Webbs. And thirdly there were the smart intellectual lot, again not very
well marked off, and on the whole practicable to bishops, of whom fewer
particulars are needed because theirs is a perennial species, and then
finally there was that fourth world which was paradoxically at once very
brilliant and a little shady, which had its Night Club side, and seemed
to set no limit to its eccentricities. It seemed at times to be aiming
to shock and yet it had its standards, but here it was that the dancers
and actresses and forgiven divorcees came in--and the bishops as a rule,
a rule hitherto always respected, didn't. This was the ultimate world of
Mrs. Garstein Fellows; she had no use for merely sporting people and
the merely correct smart and the duller county families, sets that led
nowhere, and it was from her fourth system of the Glittering Doubtfuls
that this party which made her hesi